…took place in Bologna last week. The programme looks interesting. Anyone out there go? The abstracts will be on Acta Horticulturae in due course. Via.
Getting the aroma into rice
Researchers from Myanmar and Thailand have a paper in Field Crops Research 1 describing how they managed to get the prized gene for fragrance into a local rice variety which smelled, well, ordinary.
They started out with Manawthukha, a very well-liked but alas non-fragrant variety from Myanmar, and Basmati, which of course is the most famous of the fragrant rices, due to the badh2 allele. They did four cycles of back-crossing the latter with the former, always using progeny in which they could detect the DNA marker for the Basmati allele, and finally selfed the result. They then looked again for the tell-tale badh2 allele using molecular tools, hoping to find it in its homozygous state. Which they did, in 12 lines. Agronomic evaluation of these proved that they behaved essentially like Manawthukha, but were also nice and fragrant. QED. The authors say that the use of DNA markers to identify the gene for fragrancy right from the early cycles of selection considerably sped up the whole process of getting it into the Manawthukha genome.
Which sounds like a pretty good result. But I ran the paper past a rice expert of my acquaintance and he had an interesting question. Why did…
…Thai scientists collaborating with Myanmar choose to source the fragrance gene from Basmati, not from their own Khao Dawk Mali or other Thai aromatic varieties, nor from Myanmar’s own range of aromatic varieties? The alleles are identical in Basmati, Khao Dawk Mali and most of the Myanmar aromatics.
Any ideas?
But there’s more.
Some of the Myanmar aromatic varieties get their fragrance from a different gene, and one of them has twice the concentration of the main aromatic compound. Does that variety have both genes?
Good question. And no doubt there are people working on that. But I wonder whether other national programmes will be wanting to use that doubly fragrant Myanmar variety in their own efforts to have their own fragrant rice.
Nibbles: Wild sweet potatoes, Celiac, Chains, Medicinal tea, Salvia
- How to do interspecific crosses in Ipomoea.
- Proprietary blend of amaranth, buckwheat, teff, millet, quinoa, sorghum and cassava flour for gluten-free diets.
- Making food standards work for smallholders. Yeah, right.
- Rauvolfia vomitoria leaf tea good for diabetes. Bit worried about that epithet though.
- Mexican sage banned in another state. Pass the peyote then.
The boom in heritage turkeys
I sent my post asking what is behind rocketing turkey numbers to DAD-Net and received this interesting comment from Marjorie Bender, Research & Technical Program Director, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, which she kindly agreed to share here:
The growth is reported as occurring in the US, but the reported numbers are much larger than make sense to me.
The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy has been actively researching and promoting non-industrial, naturally mating turkey varieties for over 10 years. ALBC has periodically censused this population. In 1997 the breeding population (male and female) of naturally mating turkeys was 1335. In 2003, the breeding population had more than tripled, rising to 4412. In 2006, the population had more than doubled again, reaching a total of 10,404 breeding birds.
I don’t know where their numbers came from, or how they are counting. ALBC counts breeding stock, not number of head raised.
In 1997 ALBC initiated some research on the health of the immune systems of several varieties of naturally mating turkeys and an industrial strain. The naturally mating turkeys had a significantly more robust immune system. At about the same time Slow Food USA contacted ALBC about getting ‘heritage turkeys’ on their members’ dining tables. We provided them with contacts for hatcheries and breeders and they linked them up with consumers. The main food editor at the New York Times taste-tested several and LOVED them. She wrote a wonderful article raving about them. People started looking for Heritage Turkeys, and folks started raising them but with trouble. ALBC developed a production manual and workshop — How to Raise Heritage Turkeys on Pasture — which has educated a number of people. ALBC also conducted breeder selection clinics to improve the quality of the varieties – most of which had suffered from lack of selection of the decades. The market has continued to grow, as has the motivation to produce these.
Thanks, Marjorie.
And W. Stephen Damron, a professor at the Animal Science Department at Oklahoma State University had this to add.
I’m guessing that part of this is better reporting (perhaps just separating out the turkeys from chickens in the counts) and part of it is that turkey is perceived as a “cut above” chicken as a food and is probably being used more in some developing countries (those with population segments that can afford it) as a stepping stone to “better” diets.
If you look at heirloom breeds of turkeys (not the modern big breasted type), you find that the turkey is actually much hardier than it is given credit for and can forage for itself in situations where the chicken can’t.
Using local resources to cope with high food prices
The 34th session of the Committee on World Food Security at FAO Headquarters in October 2008 included a side event of the Standing Committee on Nutrition on the Impact of high food prices on nutrition. Pablo Eyzaguirre, Senior Scientist, Bioversity International gave a presentation entitled, Coping with high food prices: making better use of local food sources.
Then he was interviewed. Well worth watching. Thanks, Arwen and Facebook.